essay
by Ivor Chodkowski| Good River Review
In a move that aligns all of Spalding’s creative writing programs for the first time, the Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in Creative Writing has joined its graduate-level sister programs under the umbrella of the Sena Jeter Naslund-Karen Mann Graduate School of Writing. The July 1 move builds on existing ties between the BFA in Creative Writing and Spalding’s nationally recognized low-residency MFA in Writing, giving undergraduate students a front-row seat to the literary world. Week-long ...| Good River Review
August 27, 2025 by Lynnell Edwards, poetry faculty As of this writing, I am a little past the halfway point in my reading for the Sealey Challenge. IYKYK that the Sealey is a formidable but rewarding challenge to read a book a day for the month of August. The modest website explains that the challenge was initiated in 2017 by poet Nicole Sealey, who, frustrated by trying to balance her professional responsibilities with promoting her first book, “decided to challenge herself to a person...| Good River Review
August 14, 2025 by Whitney Collins, fiction faculty Back in the 1900s, when my friends and I were growing up relatively unplugged and easily entertained, we often played Mad Libs, a word game that prompted players to fill in the blanks of a half-completed story with random nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The result was always a creative and non-sensical tale that illustrated the power of word choice and surprise. Fast-forward to the early 21st century, when I was no longer playing Mad Libs but| Good River Review
July 24, 2025 By Greg Pape, poetry faculty On the hottest day of the year, the poetry workshop of the Spalding MFA summer residency program met on the fourth floor of a building near Kyoto Station in a room with no windows. I had prepared a talk on Bashō and read from The Narrow Road to the Deep North, translated by Noboyuki Yuasa. Bashō came to Kyoto as a young man after the death of his friend Yoshitada. Yuasa tells us not much is known about the next five years of Bashō’s life. “It...| Good River Review
